Arcade

As its name implies, Kung Fu Factory specializes in fighting games. On the studio’s website, that point is made abundantly clear in its doctrine, which boldly states “No shooters.” The team steers clear of guns and bullets and instead focuses on what it knows best — hand-to-hand combat. Kung Fu Factory certainly has the pedigree with team members who once worked on theMortal Kombat franchise, Elite XC and UFC Undisputed 2009.

Recently, the studio’s creative director Ricci Rukavina stopped by to show off the team’s latest title Supremacy MMA. The game offers a brutual, more arcadelike approach to the mixed martial arts genre with players choosing from up to 16 fighters (some fictional, some real), who each have their own style. The combat takes place mainly on a 2D plane, but players have the ability to move in and out of the foreground by holding the L1 button and tilting the left stick. For fans of Soulcalibur, it should be somewhat familiar.

When it comes to the punching and kicking, it’s easy to pick up. The studio’s 2D background ensures that Supremacy MMA can be picked up and played by fighting game fans. Players can mash buttons and do fairly well punching with the square button, kicking with the triangle and going into grapple with the X. There are no special moves per se. The closest thing is a charge move that’s done by holding the R2 button. It does massive damage.

Well, we all know that the future of arcades look pretty dim. With console and PC games growing more powerful, the spread of broadband connections and peripherals eliminating the last advantage of arcades, it’s hard to see how they could survive.

And that’s unfortunate because these places are part of gamer culture. It’s where a slew of people first played games. It’s where communities were fostered. It’s where a lot of us hung out after school. In short, gamers could be losing part of their history if all arcades went out of business.

That’s why it’s important to preserve some of them, and in a good gesture, Stride is holding a contest to save an arcade. The catch is that players have to go to a Web site called Save The Arcades, play this Web game called Zaptaur and donate your points to one of four arcades.

StarBase Arcade over in Marin County is one of the four eligible establishments that could get $25,000. It could go a long way to keeping these indie arcades going. BTW, StarBase Arcade is lagging behind Arcade UFO by 10 million points or so. Just saying.

Although sim racing has dominated the store shelves for the better part of a decade, the next few months could show that arcade racing is making a comeback. Two developers known for their racing chops will be offering their take on the genre. Bizarre Creations, long known for its Project Gothan Racing series, is working on a new project that mixes kart racing with real-world cars and Black Rock Studio, makers of Pure, offers a Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay sensibility to wheeling around the track.

With Blur, Bizarre Creations creates an unlikely combination: It’s a kart racer that uses 60 real-world cars and 47 tracks based on 14 different environments. At E3, I had a chance to check out the game, and I had fun with the concept. There’s definitely a concreteness there that separates the title from the cartoonish roots of the genre.

You definitely won’t be throwing around turtle shells or using mushrooms for boost. Instead, players will race around familiar-looking locales (I thought I was driving through L.A. at one point.) and use weapons with real-world concepts like shunt, shock, barge, nitro and mines. Players also have shield which absorb some of these weapons but to actually use it, they’ll have to press the X button at the right moment.

I’ve always been a fan of The Behemoth. The indie developer found underground and a good amount of mainstream success with Alien Hominid. The side-scroller had a Metal Slug quality about it. It was hard as hell but it had personality.

In that same vein, the same team released Castle Crashers. I just beat it the other night and thought it was good game. It brought me back to the days of Golden Axe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the arcade. The game played to my nostalgia, but at the same time, I appreciated all the hand-drawn graphics and indie nature of it.

I’ve always been a fan of The Behemoth. Hey, they’re from my hometown. Looks like I’ll have a lot to write about tonight.

But from what I played, which was the beginning, the title has a weird feel to it. It’s half-way between a point-and-click adventure game and an RPG. The total gameplay for the first episode will last about six to 10 hours depending on how you play, according to Carol Carnes, the publicist for the title.

The developer, Hothead Games, hopes to come out with a new adventure every four or five months.